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  The terrible drought had broken only briefly, that single night of rain soaking us with less than two inches, but the winds seemed benevolent afterward, often trundling high, white clouds along the very shores of outer space, and mixing the airs so that the coastal weather stayed in general crisp and sunny. People called it an early autumn.

  Van Ness disappeared the minute he left Winona’s ranch. He’d been registered at the Tides Motel, but now no more, and I suddenly really didn’t expect to see him again. He’d succeeded in scaring me more than I’d scared him, and maybe that’s all he wanted. But he sent me a postcard from the town of Carmel, explaining that his mother had died and promising to return on Tuesday, September 4. Then we’ll see, he wrote. We’ll see if our eyes are open.

  Still, the reality of our plot was fading. Maybe he just wanted to keep the fear alive by saying hello.

  Meanwhile I learned, also, that the phony loggers in the black Silverado pickup had been camping across the Gualala River but lately hadn’t been seen there. Things were easy. Winona settled in after her coastal wandering and the ugly horse Red was no longer my responsibility. As soon as Clarence came back from L.A. I’d have the pot cultivation off my hands. And Winona mentioned that Harry Lally’s wife had boarded her horse at the Say-When Ranch, where the equestrian set held their gymkhanas, and gone off for three weeks in Brazil with her gangster husband. It seemed these autumn breezes had carried away all the heat and fog around me, leaving my days sweet and vacant.

  I had more time to spend with Melissa, but she had less for me. I’d never suspected her of anything like fidelity, certainly, but since the day we’d started up I’d believed I was the only steady one. Now I didn’t know, I sensed another presence in her thoughts, and I didn’t ask for the truth because I feared that’s what I’d get.

  A week after I left Winona’s I woke up in my own apartment, a rickety box in a fourplex, but mine, an apartment holding more garbage than furniture, but all of it gloriously mine, for the first time in many days. Nobody after me, and coffee in my very own cup. Maybe the weather had anticipated this happiness, this treading through trash in what was supposed to be my living room thinking that I should wash the plastic floor, that I should pull the bedsheets from the windows, popping tacks, which I’d sweep out of here immediately along with all this other crap, mostly wine bottles and paper plates, and put up hopeful, restful curtains.

  But such spacious freedoms can’t be infinite. What we gather together has a way of unravelling. That morning I visited Melissa, but she acted nervous and, if possible, more foreign. As if she were hiding something from me. And when I refused to stop talking with a phony British accent, she kicked me out of her little trailer. She’d actually swept the place, and I’d have been willing to hang out longer.

  But I felt alien vibrations as we made love in her narrow bed, our knees and elbows banging the trailer’s walls, and when I came, I ejaculated a paranoid essence.

  “Did I mention, dahling, that my teddibly beloved wife is back in town?”

  “I told you, please don’t talk that way.”

  “Okay. Okay.”

  “It isn’t funny, not to me. I’m trying to learn American. Get out.”

  “I’m leaving,” I said.

  For a few minutes I sulked, sweating beside her in the bed, our skins sticking together wherever we touched.

  Usually she let me open up, use different personas. One was a version of my grandfather, the Welshman, revised somewhat during my years in ritzy prep school and then put away. Usually I made her laugh—I spoke in Granddad’s voice, walked with his bowed legs, expressed his smugness, his gruff eccentricity and the ubiquitous terror wriggling underneath it. I hadn’t known him long, but having seen him a little as a very small child I had no trouble tracing some of his mannerisms through my father and finding them in myself. My brother Bill, in profile, especially when the late sun lights his blue eyes, looks exactly like Granddad. It’s breathtaking, the persistence of that man’s invisible force, that soul, blazing up decades later in another face. Anyway lately I’d let my Britisher out, and it was hard to get him back in. I’d seen this man in my dreams a lot lately, angry dreams where he attacked, sometimes brutalized, soft Italian film stars, white Italian statues, even a church door of the type I’d admired in Milan. It doesn’t take a high-paid shrink to explain that the two faces of that alliance are still at war, that the feelings once knotted up in the marriage of my paternal grandparents still whirl in my own guts, that the judging Anglo half of me blames the passionate Italian for all my troubles, and that my going around imitating him isn’t just a stupid laugh, but a sure sign that the strong British male is dominating, that he’s going to do the horrible things made necessary by the woman inside, the crazy Italian female part of me who’s disarranged my life.

  “Did you forget how to put your pants on? It’s over the legs.”

  “Right, I’m sorry.”

  “You’re just holding them in your hands!”

  “I’m sorry. It’s been chaos. People have truly been after me, but it’s going to be better now. Those two loggers, you saw them, in the Silverado—they weren’t loggers—”

  “With the dogs? Such happy dogs!”

  “Their happiness really doesn’t interest me, honey.”

  “They came here yesterday. They paid a courtesy call.”

  “Who? The dogs? The men? Yesterday?”

  “The dogs with the men. They want to ask me about you but I said, I don’t know.”

  “Oh my God. Yesterday?”

  “Yes, it’s as I said, yesterday! They ask if you have some marijuana growing.”

  “I’m having an attack. I’m going to vomit.”

  “I said I don’t know. Nothing, nothing.”

  “And they accepted that?”

  “The man said, very well, okay, see you, we’ll be in the neighborhood, we know your address. I said that’s obvious!”

  “Oh, yeah? And what did he say to that?”

  “He told me that this is just a courtesy call, and next time no. It won’t be.”

  “No, sweetie, it won’t. Do you remember where my pot patch is?”

  “Sure. I wasn’t so drunk.”

  I put my face in my hands and expected, from the wild churning in my solar plexus, to explode with horrible sobs. Instead it suddenly occurred to me that the timing here might be not too inconvenient. “Actually,” I said, “if we lose the plants before Clarence turns up, he’ll never know how it all came about. He won’t necessarily blame me. Harry gets the plants, I get off the hook. Clarence gets the shaft, but that’s better than eternity in the grave for me.”

  “Clarence the surfer? I saw him last night.”

  “I’ll cut out your tongue!”

  “In the Safeway I saw him buy bread, and beef jerky, and magazines. And for that you want to cut my tongue?”

  “Forgive me,” I said.

  Take it all around, life showed every troubling sign of having sunk to its usual clammy depth. Clarence! I’d have to get honest with him, fill him in truthfully, face his disappointment.

  I’d just dragged my jogging shoes onto my feet when she asked me, “What are you thinking?”

  I was always flattered when she asked after my thoughts. I always gave her the truth.

  “I’m thinking how nice it would be for us if most of the people I’m supposed to love would drop dead.”

  Wilhelm Frankheimer sat on a stump beyond the sheep pen, bending far over toward the ground, going to almost acrobatic extremes to attack small scurrying ants with an old saw blade while Melissa moaned and sighed and sometimes laughed inside the trailer. Frankheimer was still naked.

  After a while, Fairchild came out and drove away.

  It sounded to Frank as if the little heap, a rickety Porsche, stood in need of potent ministrations. But it got Fairchild up the hill and out of sight and that was all Frankheimer cared about. He strolled back inside.

  Melissa sat on the bed’s ed
ge shivering. The whole business turned him on.

  He stood in front of her until she took him in her mouth. In seconds, he came—he’d been screwing her for half an hour and hadn’t even been all the way erect; now the low-rent quality of the moment gave him ecstasy.

  She turned her head, leaned sideways, and spat sadly onto the floor. It made him feel like marrying her. This underfed wench he could usually take or leave. Women did, he seemed always to forget, have moments like stilettos. No telling when you’d be stabbed.

  “Why did you make me hide?”

  “I told you to leave!” she said. “Not to hide!”

  “Where am I gonna leave to, with no pants on?”

  “Obviously to no-place. And then you come back inside and make me suck your cock!”

  “Why did you make me hide?”

  “Because,” she said, “he’s important to me. Now do you want to lie down with me? He won’t come back. Do you want something cold to drink?”

  Frankheimer reached down under the bed, feeling around close to the wall. “I just came back in here for my clothes.”

  He was standing there buttoning his trousers and looking at Melissa’s very white features, her small, pretty mouth, when it hit him again—the astonishing persistence of the Yvonne problem. That hurt kept swimming up. He looked at his reflection melting in the cheap mirror and declared out loud: “Maybe I just need sincerity. I think that’s all I need.”

  All of a sudden, he understood that he was going to shoot up.

  He happened to be carrying some crank, a quarter ounce of pebbly amphetamine he’d agreed to deliver to Harry Lally—but not to Harry Lally in Brazil. He could feel the bulge in his right-hand pocket. He’d really never cared for the stuff but it had a habit of presenting itself at certain moments. He consoled himself that he’d probably been intending this anyway. He’d been carrying his outfit around for days.

  Melissa watched him, scowling. “Rape me, spy on my boyfriend, now you’re going to shoot cocaine.”

  “I’m not doing coke. This is crank, not coke.”

  “It’s all poison.”

  “Frank’s on crank,” he said.

  “So long. So long to your mind.”

  “Would you lend me some money?”

  “Good-bye and good luck to your brain.”

  “I could use a little cash.”

  “Do I look like I have some? Or even any?”

  “Just a thought.”

  Frank rummaged in her kitchen drawers and then bent the neck of one of her spoons to mix up in. The needle was barbed. He had to file it sharp on a matchbook cover. He liked the fascinated look on Melissa’s face.

  For a minute he sat with one leg draped over the other, holding the syringe between two fingers like a cigarette.

  She was goofy and told him her goofy fears. “Nelson is going to do something about his wife.”

  “Who’s Nelson?”

  “Him. Nelson Fairchild. Don’t you recognize him, didn’t you work for him?”

  “I laid the roof on his house.”

  “There, you see?”

  “I did the plumbing, too.”

  “He’s going to do something bad. You see?”

  “All I see is you don’t speak English.”

  “He’s going to murder his wife.”

  “Nelson Fairchild?”

  “Nelson! Yes!”

  He stuck a vein, introduced the crank and walked a half mile up to the ridge and four miles down to Point Arena feeling electric and friendly. When he got to town his legs just kept going.

  Some kids in a Chevy van picked him up walking south along the cliffs. Ragged Metallica echoed out of their stereo’s speakers, but the black ocean contradicted all rock-and-roll. A bit farther down the coast the cloud cover dissolved, and he stepped from the van onto the sunlit sidewalk of Anchor Bay, two rows of buildings laid out on either side of the highway, which became the town’s main street for the distance of one city block. He’d built half these structures. He remembered measuring and cutting the wood for the counter in the Full Sails Cafe, the counter at which he sat now, spreading his hands out on its surface in front of him and feeling they were magnificent things and smiling at the waitress. He grabbed a napkin from the dispenser and wiped at his nose as a way of covering up his convulsive happiness.

  The waitress said, “Catching a cold?”

  “Oh…” He paused to consider the question. “Not necessarily.”

  He remembered he wasn’t hungry and hit the sidewalk outside, the thud of his feet on the pavement running up through his head and the screen door slamming with a thrilling rightness.

  Across the street were the Laundromat and service station. A spiky-haired young boy stood by the gas pumps with his mouth open and his hands in his pockets. Frank believed he recognized the lad. He crossed the street, adjusting and readjusting his sunshades, and raised his hand in greeting.

  “I was sorry to hear about your dad.”

  “My dad? What about him?”

  “Well, that he died, little friend.”

  “My dad?”

  “I knew him well,” Frank said. “He had a great tan.”

  “My dad is right there. That’s him. He’s alive.” The boy pointed toward two men talking by the grease pit.

  “Well, hell then, shit then. Who died? Somebody’s dad, I thought.”

  “Not mine.”

  He didn’t like this. Second thoughts started eating him and the clouds began to look like fists and the shadows like deep gashes.

  Half-remembered things, words he hadn’t quite heard, details that hadn’t quite registered, suddenly swarmed over his consciousness. The connections proliferating, lighting up, formed a grid that fell down over his understanding like a net. He shook it off.

  “Going to school, kid?”

  The kid wouldn’t talk to him, and walked over toward his father instead.

  Frank took a few paces to stand by himself at the edge of the street, taking note of everything around him. The cars, the people, any distraction at all. But random facts now coalesced in a geometry of crushing significance. Remarks, events, all of which had seemed by chance, suddenly became evidence. Things he’d heard, whispers. Words he was about to remember became tendrilous heads like those of sprouts, their mouths open. But nothing came out. They didn’t communicate telepathically. It was much more intimate than that.

  He turned to the window behind him and looked through it. He saw the Point Arena cop doing the bad Laundromat thing, moving and folding clothes—bad because it’s all yours, all falling apart, like the universe—and it occurred to him that now was the time to go public with all this, time at last to seek justice through the system.

  To the west, assuming they had Laundromats in Japan, it was seven thousand miles to the next nearest coin-operated cleaning machine. Four dozen miles north to the Laundromat in Fort Bragg, fifty miles south to the one in Jenner, several others twenty-six miles due inland in Ukiah—over twice that far by the roads. A long ways to a wash, any way you wanted to go. It irked Officer Navarro that he had to drive down here to Anchor Bay, nine miles from Point Arena, every time his socks smelled. Certainly he’d travel that far for a steak, a show, two minutes with any reasonably pleasant woman, but there was nothing to do in Anchor Bay—twelve buildings and a commercial campground set between Gualala and Point Arena, with a spectacular view of the Pacific—except sit in the one bar and have a few, then drive with an illegally high alcohol blood level back to Point Arena. And he really shouldn’t do that. He was off duty and wearing plain clothes at the moment, but everybody seemed to know him.

  Navarro fed dimes into the automatic dryer and made up his mind to nurse a beer at the Full Sails.

  Just as he left the Laundromat, half expecting to end up publicly drunk, the tallest man in the county—Frankenmayer?—approached him and held up a hand the size of a baseball mitt.

  “Can I get a minute, friend?”

  He’d seen this guy around
—from a quarter mile off, you saw him—but this was the first time up close. The man created a shadow. He was a walking eclipse of the sun.

  “Sure thing,” Navarro said, and, keeping in mind his public-relations crisis, made certain to smile.

  “People are doing things to me.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “That’s the simplest way of putting a complicated thing. The other night I heard something out back and I found one of my hoses cut.”

  “A hose?”

  “A water hose, yeah. I think I know who’s doing it but I can’t prove it.”

  “I wouldn’t get too worked up about it.”

  “That’s just the latest example. People are watching me, cutting into my phone lines little by little, tampering with stuff, spraying mist through the windows. They had my car rigged to spray mist. Now listen,” the big man said, suddenly smiling, almost jovial, “I know how it sounds. But if you staked out my place for forty-eight hours, you’d make the biggest arrest of your life. You’d change history. I shit you not. The history of the world.”

  “People are pranking on your car?”

  “I’m talking to you. Are you listening?”

  “If there’s been actual damage, then you’re talking about vandalism, which is illegal.”

  “They’ve got very tiny devices attached that spray mist out at you. This mist fucks with your meridians. It upsets the physical metabolism in a very dangerous way.”

  “Meridians?”

  “Do you know anything about acupuncture? The I-Ching? Ancient Chinese philosophies?”

  There was a way of sliding around a thing like this. You had to regard it as encased in glass. “I’m not sure I have your name right,” Navarro said.

  “Frankheimer.”

  “Could you show me these devices, Mr. Frankheimer? Something that doesn’t belong in your car, that sprays mist like you say?”

  “I tore all that shit out, man. The mirrors, everything. I don’t get in that fucking car. Why do you think I walked down here?”

  This guy was massive. Massive. “I don’t see where a crime has been committed,” Navarro said.